A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Tag: national id

The REAL ID Act is a federal law that calls on states to knit their driver licensing systems together into a national ID. Congress passed it nine years ago yesterday, setting a three-year deadline for state compliance.

You might think that a program would be dead if it failed to materialize after more than triple the time Congress gave for its implementation. But REAL ID is walking dead.

After the law passed, half the states in the country passed resolutions objecting to REAL ID or laws barring their states from complying. And the Department of Homeland Security has pushed back the deadline again and again and again. But the federal government keeps funding REAL ID, and state bureaucrats keep plodding forward with the national ID system.

In a Policy Analysis released today, we examined the progress of REAL ID in states around the country. REAL ID: A State-by-State Update reveals that some states’ legislatures have backtracked on their opposition to the national ID law. Some motor vehicle bureaucrats have quietly moved forward with REAL ID compliance contrary to state policy. And in some states, motor vehicle bureaucrats have worked to undercut state policy opposing REAL ID and the national ID system.

Funds for implementing REAL ID come from DHS annual budget, which is appropriated by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees’ homeland security subcommittees. Congress has put around $50 million a year toward REAL ID in recent years, part of $300 to $500 million a year it spends on identification and tracking programs.

The alternative is better: Congress could save money and protect liberty if it fully defunded REAL ID. State political leaders should check to see if the administrators who work under them are building a national ID contrary to state policy, or if bureaucrats are lobbying to put the legislature behind the national ID program.

It hasn’t been implemented, but because it hasn’t been repealed or defunded, REAL ID awaits the day when the political winds blow in favor of a national ID.

Like some sort of zombie from a 1950s B-movie, the REAL ID Act shambles forward, awaiting the day when some national emergency can bring it back to life.

In the District of Columbia, the city government has announced that they will begin to issue REAL ID compliant driver’s licenses from May 1, 2014 onwards. The city’s “REAL ID Credential” page sings every note in the pro-national-ID song book. It says that REAL ID is “not a national identification card,” a claim debunked on this blog long ago. It also says that REAL ID will help “inhibit terrorists’ ability to evade detection by using fraudulent identification.” That’s true, as far as it goes. But inconveniencing wrongdoers this way provides a tiny sliver of security compared to the costs in dollars and privacy, not to mention the inconvenience about to be visited on D.C. residents.

The D.C. government says that the change is being made “to ensure our residents will have access to federal facilities and the ability to board airplanes.” Never mind that the federal government has caved over and over again after threatening to disrupt air travel. D.C. plans to put all 540,000 or so licensed drivers into the national ID system over the next few years, including many federal policymakers.

In Louisiana, meanwhile, state legislators have advanced a bill to repeal the state’s 2008 ban on participation in the REAL ID program. The bill’s proponents also say that they must put Louisianans into the national ID system or they won’t be able to fly. Again, the federal government will never cut off Americans’ right to travel because they live in states that don’t comply with REAL ID. It’s been threatened over and over again, and the federal government alwaysbacksdown.

But there may yet be a stake that goes through the heart of the national ID program. A bill to repeal REAL ID has been introduced in both the House and Senate. H.R. 4073, introduced by Rep. Steve Daines (R) of Montana, and S.2121, introduced by Daines’ rival in the current Montana Senate race, Sen. John Walsh (D), both would repeal the REAL ID Act.

It is refreshing to see some pushback against REAL ID during the current Congress. But is it enough to kill the zombie national ID?

“Arguments leveled against Real ID are being recycled to bash the National Security Agency’s surveillance program,” she writes. “They inevitably lead to the assumption that the government is up to no good.”

Well, … yes.

The argument against creating a U.S. national ID is that its cost in dollars and privacy are greater than the tiny margin of security they might provide. Over years, I’ve pointed out that spending billions of dollars to herd law-abiding Americans into a national ID system might mildly inconvenience any terrorists. It’s not worth doing.

That idea—that security measures should be cost-effective—is wisely ‘recycled’ for use with respect to the NSA’s program to gather data about every call made in the United States. Doing so doesn’t provide a margin of security worth the cost in dollars, privacy, and menace to liberty.

When the government wastes our money, privacy, and liberty on programs that don’t provide a sufficient margin of security, that is bad. That is government “up to no good.”

The states asked to implement our national ID law rejected it because, in the disorganized way our federal republic makes decisions, it was decided that REAL ID does not pass muster. (Some states and national ID advocate groups continue to press forward with it, a subject on which I’ll say more soon.)

In a similarly messy process, the organs of democracy are finding that the NSA’s programs—originally constructed and conducted in secrecy—do not pass muster either. We’re rightly pushing this plate of peas away.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a cost-estimate for the Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 1772). That bill is one part of the House Republican’s immigration reform package that would nationally mandate a version of E-Verify.

Source: CBO Cost Estimate for H.R. 1772 Legal Workforce Act, page 2.

CBO notes that many unverifiable employees will be pushed deeper into the underground economy by E-Verify – something that is already occurring in states that mandate its use. Some employers would no doubt continue to pay unverified employees, but would do so off the books and off the radar of the IRS and Social Security Administration. While the government would receive an expected $49 billion in on-budget revenues from new sources of income tax revenue and payroll tax revenue from 2014 to 2023, it would lose $88 billion in off-budget revenue during the same period – mostly from Social Security payroll taxes lost as workers join the underground economy. That’s a $39 billion net loss to revenues due mainly to E-Verify.

My colleagues and I have written extensively about the threat that E-Verify poses to employees, employers, and civil liberties. The CBO estimates that expanding E-Verify would cost the federal government $635 million over the 2014-2018 period, followed by a similar amount from 2018 to 2023. That translates to roughly $1.2 billion in new hires, data retention systems, enforcement tools, and other goodies for the Department of Homeland Security.

The Legal Workforce Act would also impose costly new mandates on state and local governments and the private sector. The CBO estimates at least $10 million in total annual costs to be imposed on state and local governments that will be forced to comply (currently, only 20 states mandate the use of E-Verify for new public hires). And the office estimates a minimum cost of $200 million annually from 2016 to 2018 for private sector employers as they struggle to verify an estimated 50 million employees.

The Legal Workforce Act imposes new costs on the federal government, on state and local governments, on employers and employees, and will push some workers further into the underground economy – all without (thankfully) achieving its core objective of excluding unauthorized immigrants from the workforce. While the CBO may not be known for its accurate fiscal projections, the inevitable net fiscal costs of this bill make it hard to draw anything positive from this recent report.

Sometimes there are setbacks to the efforts of the Department of Homeland Security, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, and state motor vehicle bureaucrats to quietly knit together a national ID. If this story is true, Ohio appears to be breaking with the national ID plan.

What’s remarkable about this case is Ohio’s recognition that the federal government will never act on the threat that TSA will refuse drivers’ licenses and IDs from states that decline to implement the REAL ID Act.

Ohio is among a growing number of states that are refusing to comply with federal standards intended to toughen access to driver’s licenses. … The states are betting that federal officials do not implement plans to accept only “Gold Star” licenses as proof of identity to fly on commercial flights or to enter federal buildings and courthouses. “We’re not so sure the federal government” will only honor IDs that meet its requirements, [Ohio Department of Public Safety spokesman Joe] Andrews said.

Time was when states fell in line at the suggestion of this federal government threat. Eight-and-a-half years after REAL ID became law, the states may be recognizing the inability of the feds to coerce them into implementing their national ID.

But a few days ago, Idaho became the third state in the union to sign up for the Department of Homeland Security’s RIDE (Records and Information from DMVs for E-Verify) program, which is administered by the ID-friendly American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. Idaho joins Mississippi and Florida in volunteering state driver information to the DHS.

As the full name of the program suggests, RIDE is an “add-on” to E-Verify, the government’s highly problematic system for “internal enforcement” of immigration law via government background checks. RIDE is intended to let the E-Verify system check the authenticity of driver licenses that are typically provided as one of the forms of ID during the broader verification process. E-Verify’s problems are legion—I documented them in my 2008 paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration“—and we highlighted them again on Capitol Hill in March.

Much like mass-scale license plate scanning, the RIDE program represents the application of technology and systems developed for one purpose to vastly different ones. The RIDE program takes state driver licensing data—which is for driver licensing and traffic law enforcment—and turns it over to the DHS for federal law enforcement and the creation of a national ID.

In 2007, Idaho was the second state in the nation to reject the REAL ID Act, our national ID law. The Idaho House and Senate passed a resolution condemning that effort to put all Americans into a national ID system. But the bureaucrats appear to have waited out the legislature. With most people’s attention elsewhere, the Idaho Transportation Department teamed up with DHS officials to move forward with a national ID.

After the DHS has tapped into Idahoans’ driver data, there is no guarantee that the uses of it would be limited to E-Verify. Mission creep is a law of gravity in government, and it’s likely over time that E-Verify and Idaho driver data will be put to new and interesting uses by the federal government. Expect the DHS to get a lot more familiar with you and your driver license data if mandatory E-Verify comes into effect and RIDE continues to grow.

It’s appropriations season! – that wonderful time of year when the House and Senate pass competing versions of legislation to fund government agencies, bureaus, and…whatever pork and pet projects they can squeeze in.

Congress has made most of its spending decisions over the past few years through last-minute continuing resolutions or consolidated appropriations bills. That makes it harder to follow the money (which may be part of the reason they’ve been doing it that way), but it’s important to watch the dollars because some of that money is going toward national ID systems and biometrics.

Last week the House passed their FY 2014 Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. As in years past, the legislation contains funding for three of everyone’s favorite identification programs: REAL ID, E-Verify, and US-VISIT/the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), a DHS office covering biometrics for travelers at airports, ports, and other points of entry.

For the coming fiscal year, the House appropriated $114 million for E-Verify, $232 million for OBIM, and $1.2 billion for the State Homeland Security Grant Program (SHSGP), from which grants for REAL ID implementation get doled out to states.

These numbers are consistent with past levels of appropriations for these programs, with the exception of REAL ID, which had its own funding stream until it was folded into SHSGP in fiscal 2012.